Links to questions asked:

Please introduce yourself and what you do.

What got you into technology in the first place?

What do you think's significant in terms of the changes that are happening now?

Some organisations are really bad at getting their messages across. How is The Messagery going to help?

Tell me more about the deliverables?

You come from an audience viewpoint. Your partner comes from the client viewpoint. How do you reconcile those differences?

Do you see a next big thing coming?

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David Terrar:

Today's guest is an old friend and my writing mentor. He's the best technology editor that I know. His superpower is clarity. And we'll be talking a bit about that later. We’ve both been around in the tech space for a long time, as you'll discover. But I've known David, since the mid-2000s. When blogging and social media and the cloud were coming to the fore, we’ve done lots of stuff together. We almost wrote a book together called The Cool Curve. But that's another story. He's here with me in the mixed reality studio on this fine Monday morning, David Tebbutt. Welcome. And please introduce yourself and what you do.

David Tebbutt:

Thank you, David. And you're very kind, by the way. Right, so, my primary activities are writing, editing and training. These are three careers that have been going on for ever. Well, not for ever, for a long time. And this year, I started a new company called The Messagery. that aims to help people help companies to get their strategic messages, right. It's very easy to mess these things up. People sometimes don't know what their key messages are. So, we come in and we help them.

David Terrar:

Excellent. Now, before we get into that, I want to go back to some history. I mean, I know you've been around in the tech space even longer than me. What got you into technology? And I didn't know that you actually kind of did the proper first launch of Personal Computer World in 1979.

David Tebbutt:

Well, I did a relaunch actually, but I'll explain that later. Yeah, what got me in was a shower of rain. I was walking through Greenford in Middlesex. The heavens opened and I ran into the nearest building. It happened to be NCR. I sat in reception. They tried to throw me out. The receptionist tried to throw me out. The commissionaire tried to throw me out. And then they got a manager. As he was throwing me out, I said, ”What do you do here anyway?” And he said, “Do you really want to know?” I said, “I do”. And he said, “Not just because of the rain?” I said, “No”. He said, “All right.” And then he explained what NCR did. And he mentioned the word ‘computers’. And I said, sounds interesting. He said, “Do you want to do an aptitude test?” I said, “Yeah, all right.” He said, “All right, come back tomorrow. I'll give you an aptitude test.” Well, I did it in half the time. And I got 100%. So, I was hooked. It took NCR another nine interviews before they accepted me. But they did. So that was

David Terrar:

Excellent. So, NCR - National Cash Register for people who don't recognise that three-letter acronym. But I mean, I know that you interviewed Steve Jobs when Apple first started, and you interviewed Don Estridge who was the kind of IBM’s father of the personal computer in 1981. So, you've seen a lot of changes happening over the years? What do you think's significant in terms of the changes that are happening now?

David Tebbutt:

Well, there's a question. I mean, I can think millions of things but the main ones probably are

Data: Let’s go for big data, and the associated machine learning and AI because they go together. Big data are vast knowledge stores, or whatever you want to call them, are an absolute gift to the AI community. It's just totally fantastic. And it can be used for all sorts of good things. It's, never going to be a Shakespeare, but it is bloody useful as an augmentation to human capabilities, providing the data's right. And, if it's wrong, well it's garbage in garbage out again, isn't it?

Okay. That was one. Cybercrime: How about cybercrime? Security is a huge topic, massive, and I know it's not new, but it's accelerating. And these cyber criminals are using exactly the same technologies that the white hats are using. Do you know, if all fraud were a business, its GDP would lie between Japan’s and Germany’s. That is absolutely astonishing, isn't it?

So, another one is Sustainability. Everybody bangs on about sustainability. But you know what? Most of them haven't got a clue. They just do not understand. The thing about sustainability is it's got to take into account the creation of something, the use of something and the end of life of something. If it doesn't take all those into account, then the maths are all going to be wrong because you could say, “Oh, I drive an electric vehicle. It doesn't pollute, doesn't do anything.” But what about all the building of the thing in the first place? The batteries the mining and disposal at the other end. I don't want to bang on about it too much. But if you want reality, In that sense, there's a guy called Vaclav Smil. And he's written fantastic books. And they're all based on numbers. So, he uses all the numbers of cows in the world, or fossil fuel reserves, or building windmills, and all the horrible stuff that goes into building a windmill. And he just lays it out very calmly. And he doesn't make a point, is not political or anything. So, I would recommend that if you're into sustainability.

And then Augmented Reality is probably the fourth one I would choose.

David Terrar:

which we're standing in at the moment.

David Tebbutt:

Well, this is true. But I'm thinking about if you look at the augmented reality headsets at the moment, I mean, they're big, they're clunky, you look stupid, and you can't really walk around the street. But these things are going to shrink. If you think about when the mobile phone came out, I mean, Steve Jobs you said - 2007, how tiny that was compared to the laptops, and the PCs that we were using at the time. Suddenly, you could do, not all of what you did on those machines, but a heck of a lot of it. Well, imagine the same thing happening with virtual reality. And aligned to that is speech recognition. And, because the systems can now talk to you, you can talk to them. So that removes a whole load of clutter. And I'm sure that the headgear is going to change as well.

So. there's four things.

David Terrar:

And I totally agree with all four of those being the key, the key things, that's good. Now, let's get into your real topic. And The Messagary, and what that's all about. Now, one of the things that's always bugged me about our tech space, is some organisations are really good at getting their message across. But an awful lot are not. They talk about features and functions, and they really do a poor job of communicating what they do. Do you agree with that? And tell us how The Messagery is going to help.

David Tebbutt:

I do completely agree with that. And it's hard to know where to start. But if you don't know what your company actually stands for, you've got a real problem. And a lot of companies are like that. Are we in it to make loads of money? Are we in it to make our staff happier? Are we in it to make the customers happy? But they don't get the first articulation right. And from there on in, everything gets fuzzy. Whereas if they can articulate the values, the benefits, the goals… If they can articulate them, first of all, to themselves and then downwards to their various - we're talking strategic messages here the company strategic messages. But strategic messages also live at the product/service level. They also live at the issue level, because a lot of sales is about getting the issues into people's minds. So, if you've got this sort of triangle of messages, then anybody that follows - your PR people, your marketing people, your advertising people, all of the people that do the tactical stuff. They're all gonna have some nice, solid foundation to build on.

David Terrar:

Can you tell me more about the deliverables?

David Tebbutt:

On the deliverable side, we get to know a company first. We do research, we do our own research. We will have taken a briefing from the company first. They will say, “Yes, please come to help us.” Then we go off and we do our own research. And we get to know the company, we get to know the competition, the marketplace and all the rest of it. And then we go in, and they deliver to us what they believe, are their key core strategic messages. And after that, it's kind of a free for all. It's a partnership. The thing is called The Refinery workshop - the core. There are four other products/services around the outside, but the core is The Refinery. And, after that, it's a free for all. We work in partnership; we help them get their messages better. We ask them questions that draw out more good ideas from them because it's really got to come from their heart and in their soul. So, then we will guide, we’ll advise, we’ll give them guidelines, we'll give them stuff that helps them do it on their own after we've gone because we don't want retainers. We’re not interested. We just want to empower people to be good at this thing. And that's it. If we do that, we've done our job.

David Terrar:

And that’s the side that you've always been through throughout your business life. One interesting thing is that I know that your partner in this is David Topping. And David's viewpoint is from the client. Your background is in journalism. It's very much from the audience's. How do you make that work? How do you reconcile those two things? Does it make it better? Because you've got the two viewpoints?

David Tebbutt:

Absolutely. Because I met David a long time ago, probably about the time I met you. We - me and Martin Banks - were running a thing called PRESS HERE. And that was about media skills training. But, by far, the biggest chunk of it was the message workshops. So that's where that all comes from. IBM decided that it'd be a good idea for their marketing people (notably David Topping) to get together with us, and put on some events for IBM staff that draw the messages out of them, and convey them to the journalist. And so we road-tested them - once we got them going, and they started writing their messages - we road-tested them by being us, Martin with a bit of a news tilt and me with a bit of a features tilt. And that way, they could see exactly what the effect of their messages would be on real people, real journalists. And that was, that was how it all began.

David Terrar:

That's fantastic. It's good. It's good to hear about it. And I think we're running out of time. So, I've got one last question for you which is, with everything that you've seen over the years, do you see a next big thing coming?

David Tebbutt:

I see a million big things, I had to write a book about it a couple of years ago. But one of the biggest things is the change that's going to happen to society. When all these augmentors, AI and all the rest of it, get put into place, they are going to reduce the amount of work that people need to do. But the companies will still make loads of money. So, if the government or the companies find a way of redistributing that extra wealth to the people whose working life has been reduced, then we're in for a great life where people will have more time for family and more time for old people. And I could go on about health, frailty… Everybody will be helped by the technologies that are emerging right now.

David Terrar:

Well, that's a good optimistic way to end our conversation. David, that's been absolutely fantastic. Thanks for all of that. And I wish you, you and the other David well with The Messagery. I hope it really works out for you.

David Tebbutt:

And I wish you well, with your CIF and this event that we're doing now, I hope you have many more. Thank you very much.